In the Hall of Fame, Character Shouldn’t Count

Jan. 9 (Bloomberg) -- The gates of Cooperstown will not
open this year for Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds, two players who
-- whatever their sins -- obviously put up numbers worthy of the
Baseball Hall of Fame.

Of course, the reason they were denied entry is that both
men, as well as several other worthy candidates who didn’t make
the grade, have been linked to performance-enhancing drugs.

Specifically, they violated Rule 5 of the Hall of Fame’s
election requirements, the “character clause,” a self-important
criterion that should have been stripped from the ballot decades
ago. According to this clause, votes for induction to the Hall
must be based not only on a player’s record and ability, but
also on “integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions
to the team(s) on which the player played.”

This is ridiculous. The almost 600 members of the Baseball
Writers’ Association of America who are responsible for deciding
who’s worthy of baseball immortality -- or a made-to-order
$2,000 bronze plaque, anyway -- should be instructed to confine
themselves to metrics that can be measured and compared.

How did Rule 5 come to be? After all, it would have been
just as easy to create clear statistical markers to ensure that
the best players of their era weren’t left out. But that was
never the point of the Hall of Fame.

Tourist Trap

It’s tempting to think of the Hall as being as timeless and
inevitable as baseball itself. Surely our national pastime
needed a trusted entity to guard its sacred history. In fact, as
Zev Chafets chronicled in “Cooperstown Confidential,” the Hall
was basically conceived as a tourist attraction. When it opened
in 1939, its purpose was to draw people to an otherwise
unremarkable village in upstate New York that claimed to be the
birthplace of the game. What better way to do so than to exalt
baseball, to weave it seamlessly into the history of the region
and our nation?

As for the drafting of the rules for admission, we’re not
exactly talking about the Constitutional Convention. The
Baseball Hall of Fame had two framers: The Hall’s founding
father, Stephen Clark, a Cooperstown aristocrat who wasn’t much
of a baseball fan, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the game’s self-righteous commissioner who levied lifetime bans against eight
members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox -- after they’d all been
exonerated of criminal charges related to the fixing of the
World Series. (“Regardless of the verdict of juries, baseball is
entirely competent to protect itself against crooks, both inside
and outside the game,” said Landis, a former federal judge.)

These two conservative, moralizing men were the prime
movers behind Rule 5. Landis, in particular, hoped it would help
ensure the election of Harvard Eddie Grant, a passable third
baseman who was killed in action in World War I -- and the
exclusion of Shoeless Joe Jackson, a member of the 1919 Black
Sox and one of the greatest hitters in the history of the game.

We can blame the clause for the ever-thickening fog of
mythology that has since enveloped the Hall, turning ex-ballplayers into moral exemplars and puffing up a sports museum
into a holy American institution.

In truth, the Hall is representative of America only in as
much as it, too, has its share of unreconstructed racists, wife-beaters, drug dealers and sociopaths.

“Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find
that baseball’s immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men
who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through
Cooperstown, taking spoils, like the Third Army busting through
Germany,” former team owner Bill Veeck once said.

Just Whims

Whatever Clark and Landis may have envisioned, the annual
Hall of Fame election has never been anything more than a
reflection of the whims of voting sportswriters and a group of
former players and executives, known as the Veterans Committee.
Yet through it all, the character clause has endured -- a
single, smug sentence calling the Hall to some higher purpose
than identifying and honoring the game’s greatest players.

Think of it less as a clause than a club, one wielded
selectively to beat back such undesirables as Shoeless Joe --
who hit .375 in the World Series he allegedly helped throw -- as
well as the mouthy Dick Allen and the game’s all-time hits
leader, Pete Rose. Now it’s being used to beat back not only
confirmed but also suspected users of PEDs, which is to say just
about everyone who has played professional baseball in the last
20 years.

This is not an optimal situation. At this rate, a
generation of baseball fans is going to walk the 5,000-square-foot plaque gallery at Cooperstown straining to recognize a
single cast-bronze face.

A simple solution is at hand. The Clark heir who has
inherited control of the Hall of Fame, noted equestrian Jane
Forbes Clark, could stop protecting her grandfather’s character
clause like a precious family heirloom and call for it to be
deleted from next year’s ballot.

My guess is that most writers would welcome the
development. They can’t be comfortable playing the role of moral
arbiters, especially in such a murky realm. We’re never going to
know who used what when, or how much it helped them. How can we
justify punishing virtually everyone who played during the
Steroid Era on the basis of an almost 70-year-old rule that was
a bad idea from the start?

What we can say with certainty is that Cooperstown is
already something of a Potemkin Village. The longer the
character clause continues to exist -- keeping dominant players
like Bonds and Clemens out of the Hall -- the further the place
is going to drift from reality.

(Jonathan Mahler is a sports columnist for Bloomberg View.
He is the author of the best-selling “Ladies and Gentlemen, the
Bronx Is Burning,” “The Challenge,” and “Death Comes to Happy
Valley.” The opinions expressed are his own.)